Girls Gone Wild!

I'm still trying to figure out if life has really changed that much in the past few years or if it is simply that technology has changed the way we view life. A few years back, celebrities had paparazzi making their lives miserable: stalking them, photographing them in compromising positions and selling the photos to the National Enquirer. Nowadays, anybody can be stalked because everybody else is a potential paparazzo! All it takes is a camera phone and a facebook account and bang! One's momentary lapse of reason lives forever on the internet for all to see. So, what once may have been a word-of-mouth story that lost steam and went away, is now a living, breathing testament to bad behavior. In that vein, let's take a look at two recent incidents, one a girls high school soccer match and the other a women's college soccer match. In the first, the Rhode Island Division 4 State Championship game erupts into a melee when one girl starts pushing an opponent and the benches clear. In the other, a college woman athlete from New Mexico takes a page from the Conrad Dobler playbook as she uses every dirty trick in the book to get an advantage. Ouch!

New stuff? Or is it just better documented these days? As for the first incident, it's great theater and certainly bad sportsmanship, but new? Nope. Turn back the clock 27 years ago. Thanksgiving Day. Traditional football game between my high school and our traditional rival. We are getting beaten pretty soundly, frustration boils over and there are punches thrown. Benches clear, because that's what kids do. Fans of each side scream and yell at each other and maybe a few punches get thrown there as well. Yes, it was embarrassing back then, but it was largely left to word of mouth, and it damn sure wouldn't have made the 11:00 news because that wasn't something they wanted to promote! Nowadays, where we are on that 24-hour news cycle and you've got local cable news fighting with the web and traditional media for eyeballs, this stuff is exhibit A, front and center. A guarantee that viewers will come in droves unfortunately.

As for the college game...brutal! But unprecedented? Nope. I guess the question with this one is, did the girl just snap? Or has she done some of this throughout her soccer career and this time it just happened to get caught on tape. I know I only have a one-game sample, but given the material I think I can solidly conclude that Lambert is a dirty player. And judging from the fact that she only got a yellow card and continued to play dirty, she is sneaky as well.